14 DAY TRIAL // A recent ban wave left many PC Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in dismay, as they maintained that they had done nothing wrong to deserve such a punishment from the Valve Anti-Cheat system. These cases were so widespread that a group was formed on Steam to protest against Valve's policy to never reverse a ban, stating that Half Life 2's developer owed them 60 dollars.
Gabe Newell, the president of Valve has issued an email to all those who were erroneously banned, apologizing for the mistake, lifting the restriction and issuing a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 for them and a friend. This is quite a surprising move, given the Valve strong policy regarding cheating in multiplayer games.
Newell wrote in the email that, “Recently, your Steam account was erroneously banned from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. This was our mistake, and I apologize for any frustration or angst it may have caused you. The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game. This wasn't a game-specific mistake. Steam allows us to manage and reverse these erroneous bans (about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks).We have reversed the ban, restoring your access to the game.”
He continued to point out that two copies of Left 4 Dead 2 were available for the customers that were affected by the mistake, one for them and one for a friend. The process of acquiring these copies was also describe as being painless. The players copy of Left 4 Dead 2 is already listed in the Library panel of Steam, allowing for immediate download, while the other one can be sent as a gift using the Manage Gifts and Guest Pass tab from the Games menu in Steam.